Too little, too late: N.Y. Times report of Hunter Biden emails sparks outrage

By Art Moore

CNN "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter dismisses the evidence of Biden family influence peddling at "Russian disinformation." (Video screenshot)
CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter dismisses the evidence of Biden family influence peddling at “Russian disinformation.” (Video screenshot)

Long after it was confirmed by multiple sources, including Hunter Biden himself, the “paper of record” has acknowledged the authenticity of the messages on the laptop of the president’s son indicating Joe Biden was part of the family’s multi-million-dollar, influence-peddling enterprise profiting from the Chinese Communist Party, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, and many others.

The news came as Biden navigated the Russian invasion of Ukraine and prepared for a phone conversation with Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping. But Republican leaders aren’t holding their breath in anticipation that the New York Times will follow up with an admission that it could have come to that conclusion before the November 2020 presidential election, when it mattered.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said last night via Twitter he is calling for a congressional investigation “into how big tech,” particularly Twitter itself, “mainstream media, and the Democrat industrial complex colluded to suppress the Hunter Biden scandals — and during the last days of the 2020 election.”

The damage, however, already has been done.

Former Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell voiced on Friday what a poll has indicated, that the revelations from the laptop “would have sunk Joe Biden’s election” if media had covered it.

“The DC newsrooms knew it. They covered it up. This is a total crisis for the US media,” he wrote on Twitter.

In a report released one month after the 2020 election, two Republican-led Senate committees concluded from their investigation that members of Joe Biden’s family engaged in deals with Chinese nationals who had “deep connections” to the Communist Party that “bore financial fruit” when Joe Biden “was vice president and after he left office.”

The report warned that the “connections and the vast amount of money transferred among and between them don’t just raise conflicts of interest concerns, they raise criminal financial, counterintelligence and extortion concerns.”

Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings are under investigation by the Department of Justice. And late Thursday, the New York Post reported a lawyer for the mother of his 3-year-old daughter expects the president’s son to be indicted for tax fraud, based on what he has seen in the financial records.

Attorney Clint Lancaster said the mother, Lunden Roberts, handed over “a significant amount of Hunter’s financial records” to federal prosecutors after being subpoenaed last month.

Political analyst Charles C. W. Cooke said it’s clear that Biden “knowingly lied to your face about the Hunter Biden laptop story,” which he “must have known was entirely true when it was first published in 2020 by the New York Post.”

Cooke recalled that during the 2020 presidential debate shortly after the New York Post reported the laptop and its revelations, Joe Biden called the report “garbage,” repeating the unfounded claim that it was “Russian disinformation.”

Biden noted there were 50 former national security officials, including five former heads of the CIA, who declared in a statement that the claims about Hunter Biden had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. However, the officials admitted they had no evidence to back their claim and acknowledged that they didn’t know if the emails – including those indicating Joe Biden not only knew about his son’s lucrative deals but also profited from them – were genuine.

“Both parties say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage,” Biden said. “Nobody believes it expect him and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.

Cooke argued that as Hunter Biden’s father, Joe Biden “must have known full well that the story wasn’t ‘a bunch of garbage.'”

“He must have known full well that it wasn’t ‘a Russian plant.’ He must have known full well that Rudy Giuliani wasn’t the only one who believed it. Hell, he knew full well that Hunter Biden himself hadn’t denied the account, and instead had said that the laptop ‘absolutely’ may have been his.

“And yet, when pressed, Biden said otherwise, because he assumed that the press and Silicon Valley would back him up in the lie,” Cooke wrote. “Which, of course, they did.”

Hunter Biden’s lucrative position as a board member of a Ukrainian energy firm seeking help from Washington because it was under investigation for corruption was at the center of the first impeachment of President Trump. Joe Biden happened to be President Obama’s point man for Ukraine policy when his son was on the board, and the vice president is on video boasting of how he forced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fire the country’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Hunter Biden’s company. Joe Biden told Ukrainian leaders the U.S. would withhold $1 billion of military aid to Ukraine if the prosecutor was not fired immediately.

At the time, the primary U.S. policy objective in Ukraine was to combat the nation’s massive, systemic corruption.

Trump brought up the issue in front of Zelensky at the White House.

The Media Research Center — which commissioned the poll MRC poll of 2020 voters that found that if the social media giants had not censored the Hunter Biden laptop story President Trump would have won reelection – compiled a montage of media parroting the “Russia disinformation” disinformation:

FLASHBACK: Media pundits lied to you, falsely claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation.”

In October 2020, after Twitter and Facebook censored the bombshell New York Post stories, the New York Times and other news outlets insisted the messages and the laptop on which they were found could not be authenticated. The Times published a story headlined “New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts.”

Conference calls leaked through Project Veritas at the time captured CNN CEO Jeff Zucker telling his editors and producers he didn’t want his network to go down the “Breitbart, New York Post, Fox News rabbit hole of Hunter Biden, which I don’t think anybody outside of that world understood.”

NPR explained to its audience it didn’t “want to waste our time on stories that aren’t really stories” and are “just pure distractions.”

In December 2020, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour chastised Republican National Committee spokeswoman Elizabeth Harrington after being asked why she would not report on a story about “one of the most powerful families in Washington.”

“You’re OK with our interests being sold out to profit Joe Biden and his family,” Harrington said, “when we’re suffering from a pandemic from communist China and he’s doing shady business deals with communist China? And you’re comfortable? OK?”

Amanpour replied: “As you know perfectly well, I am a journalist and a reporter and I follow the facts, and there has never been any issues in terms of corruption.”

Harrington said as Amanpour tried to move on: “Wait, wait, wait. How do you know that?”

See the exchange:

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Art Moore

Art Moore, co-author of the best-selling book "See Something, Say Nothing," entered the media world as a PR assistant for the Seattle Mariners and a correspondent covering pro and college sports for Associated Press Radio. He reported for a Chicago-area daily newspaper and was senior news writer for Christianity Today magazine and an editor for Worldwide Newsroom before joining WND shortly after 9/11. He earned a master's degree in communications from Wheaton College. Read more of Art Moore's articles here.


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